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mHealth – The Future of Mobile Health Care

Last month, I had the privilege of being invited to attend and make a presentation at an mHealth and the Law Workshop in Washington, D.C., convened by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. As part my presentation (October 7), I was asked to prepare a brief corresponding paper prognosticating the future of mobile medicine and health care. With permission of the AAAS, I am happy to share that paper with readers of Legal Bytes, and you can read the paper or download a copy for your personal use, right here: mHealth: Looking Forward [PDF].

As always, if you have questions, or need advice or guidance, just contact me, Joe Rosenbaum, or the lawyer with whom you regularly work at Rimon.

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When Online Games, Health & Life Sciences and Crowd Sourcing Combine

This time, the law of unintended consequences is bringing scientists and online gamers together in a crowd sourcing manner hitherto unimaginable.

An article in this month’s edition of the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology has announced (citing both research scientists and online gamers as co-authors of the article) that through a 2008 purpose-oriented video game developed at the University of Washington in 2008 – Foldit – the structure of an enzyme, one used in complicated customizing of retroviruses, was accurately modeled. 

Who cares and how does this affect us? Well, as a former biochemist wannabe, if you can model the structure of these proteins, you can better understand how diseases are caused and correspondingly develop drugs to block or stymie the progress of those diseases.

Amazingly, gamers were able to produce an accurate model of an enzyme whose structure had eluded scientists for a very long time in only three weeks and the report notes, referring specifically to medication against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) for which an understanding and design of antiretroviral drugs is absolutely critical. Seth Cooper, one of the creators of Foldit noted that "Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans. The results in this week’s paper show that gaming, science and computation can be combined to make advances that were not possible before."

If you thought the intellectual property, licensing, user generated content, crowd sourcing, cloud sourcing, social media legal issues were already enough arising from scientific research, online gaming and crowd sourcing alone were enough to make your head spin, conjure up the implications when the term ‘convergence’ is applied to any two or three of these disciplines. Isn’t it time you had legal counsel and representation who can seamlessly help navigate them while your teams are busy solving the health care and medical problems of the world?

If you want to know more about how lawyers who understand can help your business, feel free to contact me, Joe Rosenbaum, or any of the Rimon attorneys with whom you regularly work.

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BNA Highlights Health IT Issues Raised by Rimon Attorneys

The August 29, 2011 issue of BNA’s Health IT Law & Industry Report (Vol. 3, No. 36), describes some of the major legal and contractual issues raised when health care industry companies and professionals are considering moving to a cloud computing environment. Joseph I. (“Joe”) Rosenbaum was interviewed by the author, Kendra Casey Plank, for her article, entitled, “Attorney: Cloud Services Offer Affordable Solutions but Raise Privacy, Security Risks.” The article not only quotes Rosenbaum extensively, but also refers to Rimon’s White Paper series “Transcending the Cloud: A Legal Guide to the Risks and Rewards of Cloud Computing,” which began in June 2010 (see "Transcending the Cloud" – Rimon Announces White Paper Series & Legal Initiative on Cloud Computing). The series is updated regularly with individual articles on topics ranging from government contracting and state tax, to the most recent White Paper entitled, “Health Care in the Cloud – Think You Are Doing Fine on Cloud Nine? Hey, You! Think Again. Better Get Off of My Cloud,” which Rosenbaum and Rimon Associate Vicky G. Gormanly wrote and which was posted on the Legal Bytes blog August 5, 2001 (Transcending the Cloud – Health Care on Cloud 9? Are You Doing Fine?). What’s the state of your health care compliance? Are you doing fine?

Read the White Paper and, if you have any questions or need help, contact Joe Rosenbaum or Vicky Gormanly, or the Rimon attorney with whom you regularly work.